Seriously Calm

01 / History's Constant Lessons

"Change captures our attention because it's surprising and exciting. But the behaviours that never change are history's most powerful lessons, because they preview what to expect in the future."

It reminds me of The Lessons of History:

• Throughout history the nature of man has barely changed. The only difference is men have now more means to achieve their ends.
• The minority with superior ability and power shaped the society and created the history as it is. The majority of those who lived or living simply act as the audience and followers.
• The silent majority, however, serve the purpose to maintain the order and stability of society and only allow the new ideas that are really thriving can be implemented.

02 / The Illusion of Forecasting

"If you know where we've been, you realize we have no idea where we're going."

It is always the compounding effects from the trillions of events that lead to the chaos of prediction. It echoes the importance of having flexibility to deal with risk, but also the quote from The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life: I don't know where we are going, but I know exactly how to get there.

03 / The Happiness Formula

"The first rule of a happy life is low expectations."

See Arthur Brooks's From Strength to Strength; a similar point has been mentioned by Derek Sivers too. Our happiness can be considered as what we have divided by what we want. The higher the expectations, the higher we need to have to maintain our happiness.

04 / Symmetrical Personalities

"People who think about the world in unique ways you like also think about the world in unique ways you won't like."

The most classic example is Elon Musk, who's incredibly good at innovation and product implementation, but also notoriously controversial in his daily speech and behaviours.

05 / Narratives vs. Data

"Stories are always more powerful than statistics."

I think there are many interesting view points raised about the importance of telling a story well. On the other hand, it serves as a great reminder to ourselves to look at underlying facts instead of merely the framework or marketing narrative:

"Some of the most important questions to ask yourself are: Who has the right answer, but I ignore because they're inarticulate? And what do I believe is true but is actually just good marketing?"

06 / Crisis and Motivation

"A constant truth you see throughout history is that the biggest changes and the most important innovations don't happen when everyone is happy and things are going well. They tend to occur during, and after, a terrible event..."

There's a wonderful story from Sum, which beautifully illustrates a hypothetical world where people have succeeded in preventing death:

Your fantasies have cursed your realities.
The end of death is the death of motivation.
Too much life, it turns out, is the opiate of the masses.
There is a noticeable decline in accomplishment.
People take more naps. There's no great rush.

07 / Dual Forces

"A big thing to know about how people think is that progress requires optimism and pessimism to coexist."

The two forces of innovation and conservation—pushing and pulling—drive the world forward, but only an optimism powerful enough can overwhelm the conservation layer trying to maintain the status quo to achieve its intended changes.

08 / Functional Redundancy

"So species rarely evolve to become perfect at anything because perfecting one skill comes at the expense of another skill that will eventually be critical to survival."

Civil engineers always insist on having redundancies in different aspects of construction, be it design, material, or workmanship. The so-called redundancy or lack of optimization provides a vital cushion for unexpected risks.

09 / Accepting the Toll

"Everything worth pursuing comes with a little pain. The trick is not minding that it hurts."

As written in Meditations: The impediment to action advances action, what stands in the way becomes the way.

I reckon that one of the unmentioned supernatural abilities in most RPG video games is that all protagonists can absorb any pain coming from training or plot developments without hesitation or complaints. The raw ability to accept the price to be paid for success is rarely appreciated enough in real life.

10 / Difficulty Stunts

"There are no points awarded for difficulty."

But difficulty often creates an empty disguise of control, effort, and thoughtfulness. This is highly visible in certain cultural contexts where we deeply value endurance and the ability to deal with sheer hardship. Bill Gates famously remarked that he would always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it, and he has a point. If we wouldn't buy a loaf of bread for 100 dollars just to make it taste premium, why do we feel the need to cross life's finish lines with an intentional stunt?

11 / Path Dependency

"An important component of human behaviour is that people who've had different experiences than you will think differently than you do. They'll have different goals, outlooks, wishes, and values. So most debates are not actual disagreements; they're people with different experiences talking over each other."

This links beautifully to how complex historical systems develop in a path-dependent manner. Everyone and everything carries their own unique history, and we must explicitly map out those coordinates to understand our present differences.